[Charles Mcintyre]

Here is an Adobe article that could make for smoother sailing:

https://blogs.adobe.com/premiereprotraining/2011/06/quadro-4000-driver-and-cuda-driver-update-for-mac-osx-v10-6-8.html

Chuck

[Charles Mcintyre]

You may want to check the Adobe Premiere Pro forum on this. The last I heard, Mac Pro’s are restricted to the Nvidia Quadro cards if you want to utilize the Mercury Playback Engine. The 4000 is the model working for Mac users if memory serves me. The Nvidia GTX’s won’t work on the Mac Pro. Now there IS the hack that works on PC’s with unlisted cards. You may need to use the hack to get the Quadro 4000 to work on the Mac. I can’t recall, I’m not a Mac user.

Here is one thread in the Adobe Hardware Forum that MAY answer some of your questions:
https://forums.adobe.com/message/4274646#4274646

Chuck

[Charles Mcintyre]

Here is a great performance/price comparison chart for Premiere CS5 users:
https://ppbm5.com/Benchmark5.html
Unless you have money to burn, I would go with a 980X based system with RAM slots maxed out with 4GB modules = 24GB. As you can see by the chart, the Xeon based systems cost a LOT more and are not faster enough to justify the price difference. The guys in the Adobe forum are liking the new GTX 580 because it’s a little faster than the 480 and a lot quieter:
https://forums.adobe.com/thread/750054?tstart=0

It’s been noted that maxing your RAM provides a HUGE performance advantage.

For Premiere CS5, the GTX cards are a much better value than the Quadros related to performance with the Mercury Playback Engine. That high end card you bought may be advantageous for other video related work though.

Chuck

[Charles Mcintyre]

The GT240 isn’t on the Adobe MPE “Approved List” of video cards. I have tried a variety of Nvidia cards with Premiere CS5 and you can get a lot of these cards to “work” using the hack. But… the lower end cards don’t offer much in the way of a speed improvement. One bottom of the barrel card I tried even slowed things down. Right now the GTX 470 is popular because it’s fast and available at a reasonable price. I have seen dramatic speed improvements even with the low end Adobe approved GTX 280. MPE really is a phenomenal technology when you get a higher end card working properly with your system.

Chuck

[Charles Mcintyre]

“FCP was the benchmark. CS5 with Native and GPU support is gaining on it, but the tricks I’ve out laid here have been there since CS2.”

Did you mean gaining related to FCP’s enduring reputation?

Chuck

[Charles Mcintyre]

This article may be of interest:
https://www.appleinsider.com/articles/10/11/16/nvidia_announces_high_end_fermi_gpu_for_apples_mac_pro.html

In my opinion, if you already own a Mac Pro, this should be good news. If you are planning on buying a new video editing system, I think a high end PC running Windows 7 64 bit, a 980X processor and an Nvidia GTX 480 should give similar performance for approx. 1/4 the investment.

Some folks love OS X and under certain workflow circumstances, it may be worth the extra money to stick with the Mac Pro.

Chuck

[Charles Mcintyre]

“I didn’t know that PR has such a bad performance on mac”

It’s not an issue of Premiere Pro CS5 having poor performance on a Mac. It’s a matter of Premiere Pro CS5 on a high-end PC (Win 7 64 bit + supported Nvidia) being CONSIDERABLY faster (rendering, exporting) than most non-GPU accelerated video editing workflows.

The Mercury Playback Engine was developed by Adobe and Nvidia engineers to utilize GPU power to crunch certain processing tasks that are normally heaped upon the CPU. The Mac does not have this capability because it doesn’t support the Mercury Playback Engine.

Have a look at this performance chart to see how much the Mercury Playback Engine speeds up common workflow related tasks:
Look at the far right color coded area. MPE represents Mercury Playback Engine.
https://ppbm5.com/Benchmark5.html

Chuck

[Charles Mcintyre]

There is some useful information in the Adobe Hardware Forum related to Mac Pro performance.
https://forums.adobe.com/thread/737408?tstart=0

Chuck

[Charles Mcintyre]

I like the design very much. You might want to check your pages at the W3C.org page validator. Of course there are some “false positive” errors, but you might want to go over the report. Also in Fire Fox when you magnify text only, some of the text runs together. You might want to make your containers “elastic” so they expand vertically to accommodate a larger font size.

Chuck

[Charles Mcintyre]

In the upper left hand corner of the Premiere 2.0 timeline window there is a small “magnet” icon. That enables “snap-to” If I’m understanding your question correctly.